


Walk On Water

by embaasan



Category: Notice Me Senpai! (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Ninja, One Shot, Romance, sfw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-26
Updated: 2017-02-26
Packaged: 2018-09-27 04:10:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9960833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/embaasan/pseuds/embaasan
Summary: In the mountains amongst the evergreens, a boy is raised to become a silent assassin. In order for him to prove himself to the father who schooled him, he is sent to an elite academy in the city to dismantle the criminal hierarchy that reigns supreme in the shadows of its classrooms. Then he meets the school’s first and only female student, who has a sinister secret of her own...A dark but uplifting birthday one-shot for our resident ninja, Kei-senpai.





	

Son of fire. Son of water. Son of air. Son of earth. Kei was a child of all these elements; as bold as day and as elusive as the night.

He was almost eighteen, just shy of graduating high school.

At this point in his life, Kei was not like other high-schoolers. Instead of spending the long, arduous nights with his peers, stealing beer and smoking cigarettes, he sat in meditative silence in the center of his empty apartment, sharpening shurikens to the tune of the howling wind. He studied faded blueprints and the faces of the other students like they were scripture before slotting them back into an inconspicuous red folder, standing amongst his schoolbooks. Apart from these objects, this room only contained a lamp, a futon, a kettle, a slow cooker, and an over-sized gym bag, stuffed to the brim with an assortment of darts, spikes, knives and discs.

He had arrived alone in the city with nothing but the tools of his trade and his mission. Once he was done, he would return home to his father in the mountains. He thought of the snow monkeys, ambling behind him like children and napping in the evergreen trees. He thought about his dark-haired, hawk-eyed siblings, riding the horses through the frost-bitten forest with the lower half of their faces obscured. They rode on, dark and noble, as the future of his clan. Kei was the first to leave home. He needed to prove himself for their sake.

* * *

Kei was a member of the gardening club so that he could parade lethal weapons as ordinary gardening tools, but he later discovered that gardening was a practical skill.

Many times he and his siblings had been driven out to the middle of the woods and abandoned for training purposes. They had slept on the frost-bitten ground and foraged in the wilderness for something substantial to eat on their way back home, where their mother would smother their faces, still wet with dew, in adoring kisses. He could never bring himself to kill the wild rabbits that strayed into his path, regardless of necessity and survived solely off the land, even in the throes of winter. The sight of the budding strawberries, blooming in white and gold and speckled red, out in the school greenhouse made him content because it was proof to him that he could still survive by creating beautiful things instead of murdering the innocent creatures that roamed in the wild. He was a provider, not only for himself, but for his unconventional albeit loving family as well.

During his lunch break, he would scour the school's vast garden in a state of tranquility, his face half obscured by a scarf on which the school's logo was emblazoned. He hid his own face out of habit and ducked behind trees when students passed, even though he was merely watering the flowerbeds. The other boys accepted his strange behavior as eighth-grade syndrome and he went along with it. His only friend was the school mascot, who hid behind his own mask, half-boy, half-goat. The mask was known as Baa, but the boy was known as Akira.

One day Akira brought him to the third year café.

It was there that Kei felt his body pulsating as if he was recoiling from a series of warning shots. It was the first time he had set eyes on the barista of the third year café in person. He had been prepared for it. And yet when she emerged, beaming, to greet them, with coffee splatters across her pale pink apron, the sense of purpose that had washed over him became tinged in melancholy. She emanated sweetness. Even her eyes smiled along with her mouth.

What was most strange about her presence in the café was not that she was a first year but that she was a student there at all. The setting of Kei's mission was an elite academy for boys, and she was the first female to join its ranks since its formation.

This is how the school emerged on the radar as a place of interest for those who had hired Kei. The story that the school sold about her circumstances, so easily bought by the student body, did not sit right with them. Something had changed or was beginning to change. The foundations of the academy were churning with movement. It was time to act.

Thankfully, she was not his target.

She would merely be left to rot in the crossfire.

* * *

 

_Curl up into a ball. Remain motionless, as if a stone. Let the world crawl over you and trample you into the ground. Even when it manipulates your circumstances, remain resolute, firm, hardy._

Time passed and Kei fell in love.

It was the passionate, desperate love of adolescent; a torrent of doubt, desire and unpredictability. It changed the core that had been so staunch within Kei. It robbed him of his individuality. Up until this point in his life, he had assumed the aura of someone cold and ruthless: his one and only true identity was that of a killer for hire. Now his personality was becoming warped under the weight of unexpected emotions.

For a brief period, erratic winds and violent rainfall disrupted the gardening club's normal activity, and when Kei was not in the greenhouse, nurturing his strawberries, he would be in the third year café, while rain pummeled the window panes. 

She spoke to him gently but her eyes sometimes betrayed her. They revealed an expansive knowledge of Kei's origins: his family history, his upbringing and his training, and yet she was too cautious to poison him outright; too careful to speak a word.

He realized he loved her when, for the second night in a row, he had climbed into his futon to lie awake in deep thought. What concerned him was not his next step, but how to remove her from the equation. He dazzled himself with waking dreams of heroism and chivalry. 

It was empathy that lead him to fall for her. Their interactions were dyed in the colors of compassion and understanding. Although they barely acknowledged the fact that they were enemies, they watched each other cautiously from across the café from time to time, as a reminder to the other that they were always watching in wait for the first move to be made. The language written on their faces was one only they could understand.

* * *

Daughter of fire. Daughter of water. Daughter of air. Daughter of earth. Kei knew that his beloved was all of these things: he knew that and so much more.

His target was her biological father; the very father that had shunned her.

This would be his first kill and it acted as the final assignment which would bring his unorthodox schooling to a close. Under his father's tutelage, he had blossomed. His body became hard and flexible. His mind became vast and open. His sense of morality became dubious and swayed by the acquisition of money. Now he just had to prove these things to the man who had schooled him and the siblings who admired him.

She was the only obstacle.

The schoolgirl assassin known as Kouhai-chan was the daughter who did not exist. Borne of an illegitimate union that threatened to upset her father's burgeoning career in the criminal underworld, she could not remember the night her grandmother, slipped into the run down apartment to slit the throat of the tattle-tail mother. Her grandmother adored her; spoiled her rotten and raised her to be a cold-blooded killer. Nobody thought it was strange that a teenage girl was now manning the counter at the third year café. No one would have guessed that she was there to infiltrate school politics, seduce persons of interest, dismantle the alliances that had been built and kill those who did not obey. Nobody knew that she was the offspring of the man who reigned supreme, pumping money into the elite school in order to manipulate those in power. Idols, actors, champions, AI's and future leaders walked the corridors, not realizing that they were being subtly manipulated.

Kei's origins were humble by comparison. He didn't want to know how many people she had killed. Through the grapevine he discovered that when her father had unveiled the schoolgirl assassin as his bodyguard, the news had been met with derision until the moment heads began rolling. Rumors had begun to circulate that she was his biological daughter and the fear of her had only heightened. Her father's genes and the training she had endured had produced a young woman who blended into the background of society so ceaselessly that it was hard to believe that she was equipped to unhinge it altogether. Kei was grudgingly impressed.

* * *

_Stand amongst the foliage; become a tree. Though you may dance in the wind, only a godlike force will uproot you. Until then, grow gnarled and wise. Let the innocent sleep on your arms. Let them rest at your feet._

She was in the process of locking the café one evening when he entered through the door. There was a rope tied around his belt and a kunai hidden up his sleeve. To warn himself of impending failure, he pressed the blade of the kunai into his skin at intervals, lightly enough to not draw blood.

"I want you to leave," he told her resolutely from the doorway.

She looked up at him with a sad smile.

"Leave? What do you mean?" she asked. Her voice, as always, seemed to twinkle in his ears.

"Leave the school," he demanded gruffly, "go into hiding. Your father's reign is coming to an end and it would be the wisest thing for you to do. Regardless of what lies your grandmother feeds you, that man is never going to acknowledge you as his daughter. If you leave now, you still have a chance to be a normal girl."

The cash register sprung open with a thwack and before Kei could react, she was aiming a handgun, equipped with a silencer, in his direction. She seemed incredibly weary but his words had obviously rattled her. When he had mentioned her father, she had begun to sneer. 

"Aren't you the biggest hypocrite I've ever met?" the girl growled in frustration. "You and I are exactly the same and you damn well know that!"

"My clan kill for the benefit of the society, not at its cost."

"Killing is still killing!" she shrieked.

Enraged, the girl pulled the trigger. Kei had cautiously watched her emotions mount and ducked at precisely the right moment. Rolling forward, out of the bullet's path, and up to the counter, he leaped across the wooden counter top and took her by the shoulders. By forcing her into a wall, his intention was to limit her temperamental movements but she was far stronger than her slight frame indicated. He felt the cold steel of the gun in his jaw and countered with his kunai, placing the blade on her slender neck. No movement was too subtle for Kei. He would cut her throat if he even saw her finger twitch on the trigger.

She smelt faintly of roasted coffee beans and her fingers of gunpowder tinged with the metallic scent of the handgun. He searched her face desperately. Although it was a mask of nonchalance, her eyes were wide and glistening with fear. Her body was arched away from his. He peeled the blade away from her throats in surrender and after a moment of hesitation, she lowered the gun, placing it next to the espresso machine.

"I don't want to kill you," she said quietly.

"I don't want to kill you," he responded.

The affection he felt for her smothered him, like being immersed in a warm bath. Somehow the violent scuffle had driven his feelings even deeper. He placed an affectionate hand on her trembling cheek.

"Can I kiss you?" he asked her softly.

She nodded, her eyes averted.

He bent down and brought their lips together. He was timid at first, languishing in the innocence of their kiss, but as it deepened, he grew voracious and desperate. He parted her lips with his tongue and took her hands so there was no longer anything between them, placing them above her head. He barely noticed the silence that had enveloped the dimly lit café. Blood was rushing in his ears. He was always a part of his surroundings; could detect the slightest movement or alteration instantaneously, but neither of them noticed when a bag of coffee beans toppled from the counter top, spilling its innards across the tiles like blood.

When they parted, his lips felt unnatural without hers. They had grown numb. And yet, he turned away, sliding the kunai back up his sleeve, leaving her breathless against the wall, watching him with a tormented expression.

"Leave," he advised her, one last time.

"Don't leave," she begged him in response.

* * *

_Conceal yourself beneath the surface of the water. Separate yourself from that land dwelling existence. Stand rooted like sea-grass, waiting for the moment to emerge._

The first time they saw each other as their true selves, she was still wearing her school uniform. To cover her face, she wore a white surgical mask, and as she patrolled the corridors, her unsheathed katana scraped along the floorboards. Kei, by comparison, was clad entirely in black. He was weighed down with weapons, but as he clambered up onto the roof, he was silent and as lithe as a cat. She had glimpsed the shadow that he had momentarily cast across the corridor on his way past the window, and ran up to corner him on the roof. But Kei was already gone.

Stealth and patience were paramount to his success, whereas the girl had been trained to act as a tank. She was far more proficient than he was in some aspects, but their training had been alarmingly different. She was taught to kill brutally, immodestly and excessively in order to create fear in those around her; to take the damage intended for her father and not breathe a single complaint. If she caught him, he knew he would be dead in seconds, but the way she had been taught was artless and permeated with all the ideologies that he and his family had shunned. As long as Kei could keep his distance, he was always going to win.

Her father's body lay lifeless in the headmaster's office. His throat had been slit.

* * *

_Control the elements. Decipher the stars. Change your shape. Walk on water._

He chose an impoverished area of the city and abandoned all his belongings there. He was to be picked up by his father's chauffeur that afternoon so he kept the license plate number and make of the car on a scrap of paper in his back pocket. By the canal, he doused his schoolbooks in vodka and set them alight, watching the flames die over and and over again. Inside the books were pictures of his classmates, blueprints and coded notes. Passersby looked at him in bemusement, disapproval or grave understanding.

His last stop was in the same district, in an inconspicuous looking apartment block.

It was already being said that the grandmother, having lost a beloved son, was grieving so much that she had become psychotic, hearing voices as if they came from a loudspeaker in her brain. Her engineered assassin was a failure - no granddaughter to her - and so when the girl contacted him, it was out of desperation. The whole criminal underworld was on its feet waiting for her to stroll by. No place was too public for an execution; no crevice too difficult to find. She may have been mere hours away from death and without a father to protect, she was left tormented by her own mortality.

Children of fire. Children of water. Children of air. Children of earth. The pawns of the grown-ups, flourishing in blood. No right way, no wrong way, only the things left in between.

He stole her away to the mountains and left her in his mother's care. His father had disapproved but as the months passed, the family became assured of her newfound loyalty. No one ever found out what had really happened to the girl who ran the third year café. She became a ghost; a legend that haunted the school - a myth that would pervade tests of courage for decades to come. The headmaster lied profusely, to faculty members and students alike, claiming that she had been pulled out of the school due to sexual harassment. As for Kei, no one really questioned his disappearance at all.

On his eighteenth birthday, he was watching the snow monkeys bathe in the balmy springs when she approached, clambering up the rocky path to take a seat beside him.

"I never thanked you, did I?" she began, folding her hands in her lap. "And now you're going away next week."

He nodded sullenly. He didn't want to leave her. His feelings had grown disproportionately by being in such close proximity to her, but with his parents or siblings always a hair away, he could no longer act on them as freely as he had that night in the café. He reached out shyly and took one of her hands, squeezing it gently.

"I'll be back soon enough," he said, as confidentially as possible. "I just need to steal a few files and then I'm done."

"Now don't be too hasty," she warned derisively before her face broke out into a warm smile. "I'm going to be a great ninja; far better than you are. And one day you're going to be waiting for me to come home."

He was stunned by her declaration and then laughed in delight. "Well then, good luck to you."

"And you."

She nuzzled her head into his shoulder, letting her long chestnut-colored locks drape over him, and he found himself stroking her hair. The February air was biting, but her warmth overwhelmed him. She was so capable, yet so vulnerable, like a bomb ready to explode at the slightest disturbance. 

"Happy birthday, senpai," she said quietly, and then closed her eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> I've always wanted to get involved in the fan works contests that roll around with each birthday, but _I can't draw to save my life_ , so instead I decided to write a little birthday fic for Kei - just so I can get the feeling that I actually celebrated with the rest of the fandom haha. I put it up a couple of days early, purely because it was finished and if I didn't I would forget about it and it would be lost in a sea of files for months.
> 
> I did some research which greatly influenced how everything turned out and, well, I learnt a lot about ninja and a little bit about Japanese history too. Amazing how I've spent twenty-two years of my life having virtually no idea what being a ninja entailed. I took some artistic liberties I guess you could say - whether or not they're accurate, I'm not sure, but I hope it doesn't impede too much on enjoyment.
> 
> Also I should probably note that I left the parts involving Kouhai's father vague intentionally. Originally he was meant to be the headmaster of the school, but Skillshot Labs have already alluded to this character and if he gets implemented as one of the senpai somewhere down the line then it might seem a bit weird. So he's basically just a wealthy gangster who pumps money into the school in exchange for information/power.
> 
> And I'm really sorry but I wrote this super fast over the weekend, so if any sentence structures seem monotonous or awkward, I only had a few hours to myself and wanted to get it out before his birthday! I read over it like 100 times so I hope it's all okay! I also initially wanted to write a smutty scene, but it kind of upset the tone of the story a little and I decided to leave it out. 
> 
> Anyway, thank you for reading! Have a wonderful day/night, wherever you are! And most importantly: happy birthday Kei-senpai!


End file.
